Steampunk festival celebrates retro future

KING OF PRUSSIA (AP) — A festival near Philadelphia is celebrating a kind of retro future, as if today’s technological marvels were designed in the 19th century.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports Sunday that The Gilded Festival in King of Prussia is about a relatively new subculture known as Steampunk, which celebrates an imaginary past.

Vendors sold old-time clocks, various metal gears, and skeleton keys.

“Steampunk is very much a maker’s culture,” said festivalgoer Sarah Beetham, 29, a doctoral candidate in art history from Wilmington. “We’re embracing a time of wood and metal and lace.”

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In a sense, steampunk is a game of “what if” in the Gilded Age. Festivalgoers imagined themselves as characters who traveled through time or piloted steam-powered airships, dressed in top hats or leather corsets.

Thomas Willeford pulled out his iPhone and stuck it into what he imagined would be an iPhone dock from the Victorian era. It was built from the brass gears of a clock from the 1880s, a wooden telephone box from the 1910s, and the steel horn of a 1920s gramophone. And it worked, amplifying the tinny sound of his cellphone speaker.